Shadow Country

by Peter Matthiessen

  By her own account, Nell had wept for weeks after her family left Chatham, so heartsick had she been for her lost Lucius. A year later, after her mother died, she would confide that Sybil Dyer had sobbed without restraint when the news reached Fort Myers of his father’s death. It seemed that Mr. Edgar Watson had declared his love for his sweet seamstress, and yes! she, Sybil, had loved him in return! Mr. Edgar Watson had the most glorious blue eyes she ever saw! Recounting this, Nell laughed affectionately at her simple-hearted parent. And there was more. Increasingly over the years, despite his black hair and pasty skin, her brother Watt had reminded Fred Dyer of E. J. Watson, until finally he’d confronted his wife on the evidence of her unseemly grief at the time of Watson’s death. Accusing him of being drunk, she expressed hurt and astonishment that her husband dared abuse her after all his well-known infidelities.

  Nonetheless, his suspicions rose from day to day, and his voice, too, and in the end, driven to distraction by his hounding, her mother abruptly conceded, out of her outrage and exhaustion, that in the early nineties, a stranger named Watson, arriving in Fort Myers after a journey on horseback to southern Florida from Arkansas by way of South Carolina, might have taken advantage of an unwary young woman kneeling before him while painstakingly engaged in taking pant leg measurements for his new suit.

  Nell parodied the parental exchange to make it less embarrassing to relate: her ear for her parents’ accents was so good that he had to struggle not to laugh aloud at this distressing tale—

  “Weren’t that right before you signed me up to marry, woman? My lands, Frederick, Mr. Dyer dear, I suppose it was! And weren’t that why you was in such a rush after tellin me no for close onto a year? Well, I don’t think—Never mind thinkin! Answer me! Weren’t that damned kid already in the oven when we wed? I wish you wouldn’t put it that way, Frederick—Jesus Christ! You got the guts to stand there and admit this? My lands, Mr. Dyer! No need to raise your fist and scare these children—Answer me!”

  It was finally agreed that E. J. Watson might have been Watt’s parent and furthermore that he and Sybil had renewed acquaintance, so to speak, after Mr. Watson, hearing that her husband was out of work, offered employment at Chatham Bend a few years later. Was it her fault that one afternoon when Frederick was absent as usual and her children off in the skiff somewhere with Lucius, Mr. Watson had forced his way into Mr. Dyer’s cabin—

  “Forced his way into Dyer’s wife, ain’t that it?” Dyer raged. “How come you never told your own damn husband you was raped?!” And she cried out, “For the same reason you didn’t want to know! You would have had to act and he might have killed you! “

  In the end, unconsoled by moonshine, her father had collapsed across the table, weeping in shame and rage, unable to decide whether his wife had confessed the truth or was exacting some perverse revenge for all his gadding. With no strong brain but keen instincts for survival, Sybil had emerged as the injured party: indeed, she had transcended the entire matter, saying, “Mr. Dyer, let us never speak of this again.”

  “My God,” Lucius said in awe.

  For some months, Nell’s parents chewed on their hard situation. But one day her father grew so incensed at the sight of surly Watt that he drove him barefoot from the cabin, throwing his boots after him. Discovering this too late to call Walt back, her mother, whose dressmaking paid the rent, ordered her husband to pack up and be gone. He departed penniless, fatally bitter, and was not invited to return. In the years since, Nell’s unfortunate father would swallow his pride down with his liquor and rant about his wife’s affair in the saloons: “No, no, boys, weren’t no damn rape about it! If it were rape like the way she claimed, how come she never used the gun he give her to run him off when he was drinkin? How come that bitch give her bastrid kid that name? Nosir, boys, I would of kilt that sonofabitch if them Chuckerluskee fellers hadn’t beat me to it!”

  It was true that in his all-embracing way, Papa had been courtly with the ladies, unusually attentive and considerate, and that he had bought Sybil that small, silver revolver as a protection against his drunken self, though of course this gesture had been drunken, too. But in a man so wrong-headed when rampant, love alone might not have deterred him from a tender rape. When Ed Watson drank, the whole coast agreed, he was a buccaneer and an unholy terror. At the palm-thatch whore shack on Black Betsy Key, south of Flamingo, he’d once declaimed in festive spirit, “When I fuck ’em, they stay fucked!” Their “Jack” took all he wanted when he wanted and the way he wanted, too, his Caxambas ladies would attest, with shy smiles that looked oddly askew.

  Lucius’s river walk with the Dyer girl had been observed, Eddie complained that evening, creating gossip that their family could ill afford at such a time. “Oh Lord, Eddie! She’s a schoolgirl! Scarcely fourteen!” Lucius was offended, knowing that Eddie was snobbish about Nell because her mother was the seamstress and the father a disintegrating drunk and the brother Watt a runaway to God knows where. Carrie would agree, he knew, that Eddie was exaggerating, but she only snapped crossly with a glance at Walter, “At fourteen I’d been married for a year.”

  • • •

  One day in 1917, Lucius vanished without warning. Fifteen months would pass before his family learned that he had enlisted in the Army and gone off to the Great War in Europe. He wrote to no one, not his sister, not his lovelorn Nell.

  Carrie Langford invited Nell to tea at the Royal Palm Yacht Club. “He was always our best hope for this family,” Carrie mourned, “and now we’ve lost him.” Very upset, she commanded Nell to banish any notion of a future with a man who could only be counted on to hurt the ones who loved him most. “You’ve lost him, too, so accept that, girl, and get on with your life. Because if that fool doesn’t get himself shot over in France, he’ll find some way to get the job done here at home, even if he has to shoot himself to do it.” She took Nell in her arms. “I don’t mean that, sweetheart. I say those hard things to shield myself, in case.”

  Only Lucius despised Lucius, Nell observed: the contempt he saw in the eyes of others was only the reflection of his poor opinion of himself.

  IN NO MAN’S LAND

  As a practiced hunter and a dead-eye shot, Private L. H. Watson had been proud at first to be made a sniper, only to discover once in combat that he detested what he had to do. In growing alarm, he observed himself moving like a wind-up toy through the mechanical routine of checking his weapon and its ammunition, selecting vantage points, aligning sights, and firing at some distant figure or more often just the head—a pop-up soldier silhouette, never seen up close as a human being. It became routine, a target practice, so long as he closed down thought, grew numb, so long as he shut off all discussion of it with other soldiers; he hid his mind behind an iron wall of cold and mechanical inhumanity, accepting his assignment as his patriotic duty. In the grinding attrition of trench warfare, executing anonymous “enemies” became a job as mundane as any other, and that illusion, for a time, sheltered his sanity.

  One early morning close to the front lines, Private Watson became separated from his patrol when the small group fanned out under fire and was overtaken by a heavy winter fog. In this no man’s land, moving in any direction might be fatal: he crouched down in a gully, in hopes that the drifting fog might lift enough to reveal the whereabouts of friend or foe and better determine his position.

  Before long, from somewhere not far away, came little sounds that betrayed the movement of another man; he raised and pointed his weapon, trying to still his pounding heart. Then the murk lifted just enough to reveal a crouched form with the spiked German helmet, the pallid face with small spaced teeth peering from beneath it. He had murdered that young soldier as the face turned toward him, its eyes and mouth wide open, too frightened to cry for mercy; he extinguished that life even though, in the suspended instant before squeezing off his trigger, he had seen that the Enemy was not crouched but squatting, pants down, his only weapon a clenched handful of dead grass. He had watched t
hat soldier topple over and lie still, mud-splashed white buttocks quivering, his life relinquished for the rare blessing of privacy in the thick fog. For taking a crap, he had died bereft of dignity, as the silent fog slowly enshrouded him again and the American soldier backed away in shock.

  When Private Watson’s brain stopped whirling, the questions he dreaded surfaced one by one. Had his reaction been automatic, too committed to stop? Or had there been time enough to hold his fire? Had he been cold-blooded or merely cowardly? Or had instinct told him what was evident upon reflection, that in those circumstances of proximity and drifting mist, he could not have taken the boy prisoner (Put your hands up when you’re finished, Fritz) without revealing his own location to that soldier’s comrades?

  None of this mattered. Private Watson turned in his sniper scope, reporting to headquarters that they could shoot or discipline him as they liked but his days of executing men were over. Angry in his desolation, the near-legendary sniper from the Everglades notified his superiors that war was monstrous, the greatest of all sins against Creation. After due consideration of the commendable number of the enemy this soldier had destroyed, he was sent to the rear echelons to rest his brain and receive another decoration to reinvigorate his American red blood. His refusal to take part in the ceremony brought mutterings of courts martial, execution for cowardice, rank dereliction of duty in time of war, but in the end, the political problem posed by Private Watson was eliminated with a dishonorable discharge. In 1918, he returned home stunned by so much criminally insane behavior and a little ashamed because he had survived it. His medals were discovered in the bottom of his soldier pack after he’d left for Chatham River.

  “Useless Lucius,” he commented sourly. “Couldn’t even die for his own country.”

  “Oh that poor creature!” Carrie had protested when Lucius acknowledged he had not written to Nell nor even called on her since his return. “For God’s sake, marry the girl and settle down to something!” cried his older brother, who forsook his wife and small children almost every evening for the tranquil atmosphere and superior cuisine of a banker’s hearth. Lucius snapped, “Mind your own damned business, Eddie,” and took his leave before his brother could hold forth on domestic mores.

  The first time Lucius saw Nell in the street, his caught breath closed his throat. Although an encounter was inevitable, he had not expected to be stricken by a pounding of his heart that threatened to bring him to his knees. It was already too late, he told himself, he must pretend he hadn’t seen her. She was already hastening, handkerchief to her mouth as if sickened by the sight of him. He would have cried, Nell, Nell, please wait for me had he not known how weak and destructive that would be in the light of his behavior. Nell must be twenty, almost an old maid; he could not ask her to wait for him one day longer.

  Confronted later by his sister, he had lied, saying he had not seen her, although he knew that Nell knew better, having seen him switch his eyes away like a guilty dog. But an exchange of fixed smiles and desperate greetings—how much worse! He simply could not bear to face her before he had dealt with the greater shame about his father. Until then, anything he said, however honest, would ring false.

  Lucius was drinking so relentlessly again that the Langfords shut their door. Eight years after his father’s death, his life had wandered away from him, he knew that. Subsisting on his one-third share from the sale of his mother’s house, he had no prospects, no direction or ambition, nothing to show for life but two book projects long abandoned. He nursed thoughts of suicide. Yet all along he had known what he must do to salvage his self-respect: whatever the consequences, he must overcome his dread and reclaim the Watson place at Chatham Bend. Subsisting as a fisherman, he might sniff out the true circumstances of his father’s death and the identities and motives of the men who lynched him. What action should be taken after that could be decided later.

  Papa’s old launch Warrior, refitted with a new engine, would be ready the next week. More and more excited to be leaving for the Islands, he packed rough clothes and a rifle, bought a new shotgun, gill net, and other gear as well as a supply of dry stores and canned provisions.

  On the eve of departure, Lucius submitted himself to a final broken evening at the Langfords’, who had lately removed to a new brick house on First Street, at the foot of the Edison Bridge over the river. Joining them for coffee, Eddie declared that Lucius’s “morbid obsession” with his father’s death was merely an attempt to lend significance to a feckless existence. “You’re nearly thirty! Sober up, go find a job, get on with life!” said Eddie, reminding his brother of those stern warnings against returning to the Islands “at your father’s burial”—“your father,” not “our father,” not “Papa,” Lucius noted.

  “That was eight years ago. I’m sure it’s all died down.”

  “Then you’re a fool!” Eddie exclaimed. His conviction that his brother must come to harm brought tears to Carrie’s eyes and deep furrows to the ever-ascending brow of her balding Walter, who rose at once and stepped into the pantry to fortify himself with another noble whiskey. Knowing better, Lucius joined him, and whiskey would fire a final dispute over Lucius’s vow to find out what evidence there was, if any, that Papa had ever killed a single soul.

  “Name one person who can claim he ever saw Papa shoot at anyone.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Eddie said, even as his upset sister begged her brothers not to talk about their father anymore. “You promised, Lucius.”

  “You people promised. I never promised a damned thing.” Clearly his upright siblings lived in dread, he said, not merely of scandal but of what their ancestry might signify if even one of those terrible stories about “Bloody Watson” proved to be true. If Papa deserved his monstrous reputation, then what did it mean to be the get of such a man, the blood inheritor? “That seed might sprout in one of his descendants, ever think of that? That doesn’t scare you?”

  “You’re talking crazy,” Eddie said.

  “Maybe I am crazy. Maybe you are, too, ever think of that?”

  Going out the door, he heard his sister reprimanding Eddie. “He’s not crazy! He’s just idealistic and impractical!”

  Lucius knew he had been unreasonable and also that Carrie did not disagree with Eddie, not entirely. He no longer cared. After eight years of wandering in his own head, he felt anarchic, in no mood to mend things. He was so relieved to be acting on a brave new life that he actually exulted over his break with his Fort Myers family. Scared, he suppressed a longing to seek out Nell for the blessing and encouragement he did not deserve.

  TO LOST MAN’S RIVER

  Lucius headed south at dawn next day. At Caxambas, he was disappointed to discover that his father’s “backdoor family” had mostly moved north to find work in the new coastal resorts at Naples and Fort Myers Beach. Caxambas itself had all but disappeared since the Great Hurricane, lacking even a store, and its high dunes were for sale to Yankee developers, who were planning a new winter community. Knowing the long history of this place as an Indian site, he found this saddening.

  In Everglade, where he refueled the boat, the Storters told him that their trading post on the tide creek known as Storter River would be sold and rebuilt as a hotel for Yankee anglers. Hoad still thought that his friend’s return to the Islands was a bad idea, and Lucius left early next morning in sunken spirits, going straight west to the Gulf through Indian Key Pass to avoid Chokoloskee. Off Rabbit Key, he passed a stone crab boat whose crewmen recognized Ed Watson’s Warrior and straightened from their work to stare. Neither man returned his wave.

  At Chatham Bend he found a boat tied to the dock and Willie Brown and family camped in the house. An old friend of his father, Willie seemed unable to imagine why Lucius would come back to the Islands, even when he explained. Kicking dirt, Brown said, “I spoke out agin it and I took no part and I don’t aim to tell you who did. For your own damn good, boy! Any man gits the idea the son is huntin him might feel obliged to git that dam
n fool first, you take my meanin?”

  Willie said his family would move out as soon as Lucius was ready to come in (by “ready to come in” he meant “prepared to live alone”). Staring at his childhood house where all those folks had died, he was overtaken by loneliness; he invited the Browns to stay. They seemed uneasy about this. A few days later, when he returned from Everglade with fresh supplies, their boat was gone.

  In river twilight, Lucius wandered the overgrown plantation. Long swords of untended cane struggled up through thorn and vine. Back of the cistern—it must have smelled fresh water—lay the long toothy skull of Papa’s ancient roan, run wild and finally abandoned. Deep in rank weeds not far away was the rust-red skeleton of the Model S Ford brought into this roadless wilderness by Papa. The children had admired its big single headlight and the lantern and hand grips on the rear wall of the “cabriolet” half-roof where Sip Linsey had perched on the toolbox as the only auto ever to arrive in the Ten Thousand Islands bounced and backfired around the cane field. “Looky dis nigger ridin shotgun,” Sip was heard to say to nobody in particular, as he suffered this ass-busting indignity.

  He fetched his whiskey from the boat and sat on the ragged porch all that long evening, until finally he stumbled off the steps and fell, wrenching his shoulder; a despairing howl rose from his cry of pain. He dreaded the house, the broken glass in its black empty windows: he could not sleep there. Lying down on the Warrior’s cabin roof, he stared across to the far bank where the huge crocodile of boyhood had hauled out “to keep watch on my house,” Papa had said. One day it furiously attacked and killed a large alligator that had strayed into its territory, and Papa said, “I reckon that’s not much of a gator anymore, not after that.” Papa’s baleful understatement seemed mostly uttered for his own grim amusement. He used the incident to reinforce his strict instructions to the children, who were never allowed to splash in the shallows unless that croc across the river lay out like a drift log in plain view.